claire rousay "Sentiment"
claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage. The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision.
rousay’s vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. “I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,” says rousay.
From a sprawling math-rock duo, to an array of emo-inflected rock outfits to a hired hand in evangelical worship bands, rousay worked as a percussionist for over a decade before shifting her focus to the solo collage work she’s known for. sentiment folds those experiences into her compositions. rousay explains, “As the drummer in an evangelical rock band, it’s your job, with the singers, to manipulate the crowd. You start building on the drums and you know it’s one bigger chorus and then we’re out and you can see the tears, people just start crying. I still feel a version of that when playing my own shows now.”
The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. “I have been on a quest to communicate my feelings and ideas as clearly as possible lately. Pop seemed like the way to do that this time,” says rousay. The confessional nature of sampled fragments of conversation give her pieces a specificity and sense of intimacy that is both immediate and curious. rousay’s innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. The resulting songs of sentiment are as anthemic as they are breathtakingly personal. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience.
The Juniper Berries "Death and Texas"
Facing the tragic passing of both his brother and grandfather, as well as the looming pandemic, The Juniper Berries’ Josh Stirm hit upon a strange realization. “The grief felt weirdly impersonal,” The Austin-based multi-instrumentalist says. “It brought me a broader understanding of what it means to love people and lose them.” Stirm turned that overwhelming connection to the very idea of connection into Death and Texas, a set of character-driven tracks that explore loss as an affirmation of life.
BIG BRAVE "A Chaos of Flowers"
For A Chaos Of Flowers guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie drew heavily on the poems of artists whom Wattie found kinship in, their words resonant with experiences of those often sidelined by cultural norms. “I discovered that most poems from folk traditions or in the public domain seem to be by men – to which I could not quite relate. In my search, I rediscovered some of my favorite works and poets,” says Wattie. Wattie’s interpolation of poetry from artists around the world and across womanhood, intermingled with her own, examines the chaos and confusion alienation breeds in the psyche of those othered by society. “It is a feeling of relatability and even astonishment really,” Wattie notes, “with how these writers of different standings and eras and all being female-presenting, each expressing these seemingly similar intense moments of individual experiences, of intimacy and madness. We’re alone, and yet, not.”
Guitarist Mathieu Ball and drummer Tasy Hudson help Wattie shape poetry into pieces as dense and impenetrable as they are vulnerable. Volume and noise have been essential tools in BIG|BRAVE’s catalog. A Chaos Of Flowers keenly reconfigures how the band utilize each element of their sound, allowing the space for loud movements to feel achingly quiet and abundant with delicate gestures. Ball’s guitar soars in long arcs and blusters in thick layers around Wattie’s own resolute chords. Hudson delivers her most powerfully reserved performances on record, incorporating elegant brushwork and making deft use of cymbal-work to give the songs’ deliberate paces momentum. Wattie’s voice is tempered and unhurried throughout which guides the reverent tone of each piece. Guest guitarist Marisa Anderson lends earthen, blues-inflected atmospheres to the album, where guitarist Tashi Dorji and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi amplify the squall. Working closely with frequent collaborator and producer/engineer Seth Manchester, the internal tumult of Wattie’s voice rings out in warbles, haunting echoes, and unearthly harmonies across bold immense walls of distortion.
BIG|BRAVE achieve their colossal sound through minimalist approaches, a deft understanding of dynamics and an inventive employment of percussion and distortion. The trio reconceptualize what it is to be heavy or minimal, challenging perceptions with their illumination of painfully overlooked perspectives. BIG|BRAVE’s sound on A Chaos of Flowers has blossomed, harnessing potent emotions with their unparalleled arrangements and intricate economies of space. It is an album as moving as it is awe-inspiring.
Trummors "5"
The trouble with so much Cosmic American Music is that it’s not all that ‘cosmic’ at all. The moves are there—the mood, the ingredients, musical and (ahem) otherwise, the clothes—but the substance too often comes up a little thin. Maybe that’s fine: the Flamin’ Groovies weren’t quite the Beatles either, and so to criticize the heirs of the Flying Burrito Brothers for failing to equal their forebears’ sense of stoned celestial wonder feels a little mingy, like criticizing tomorrow for not being 1972. Enter David Lerner and Anne Cunningham’s duo Trummors, though, with their fifth and possibly best album—“possibly” only because the others, too, are so damn good—to blow this frequent quibble clean out of the water. 5 (yeah, they went ahead and made their Numerical Album, just like J.J. Cale once did) is so fresh, so sparkling, and so lovely, whatever debts it owes to anybody else are immediately canceled. This may be music with an abundant sense of history, a deep, almost Talmudic knowledge of a thousand country rock records, but it steps outside the shadow of that knowledge with a confidence that feels rare indeed.
Some of that is in the writing. A song like “Hey Babe” might seem a wisp of a thing, until you listen twice and clock lyrics as fatalistic, and as beautifully compressed, as a Robert Creeley poem, coupled with a melody that feels like it’s lived inside you forever. Some of that is in the performances, the way Lerner and Cunningham’s vocals fit together just so, as ideally paired as George and Tammy’s as they float atop accompaniments from their supporting players—Dan Horne’s spacious pedal steel on “Yellow Spanish Roses,” say, or C.J. Burnett’s spare, not-quite-barroom-feeling piano on “The Jalisco Kid”—that somehow manage to be at once understated and arresting. Some of it might be the occasional ways they make subtle adjustments to genre conventions (“Cosmic Monster” sounds closer to English psych monsters Dantalian’s Chariot than it does to canyon country, thanks to Clay Finch’s electric sitar) without sounding schizoid or breaking faith with the record’s overriding mood and identity. But none of that really accounts for 5’s startling and unshakeable immediacy, its ability to cut through the fog in one’s head and one’s mood every time it comes pouring out of the speakers.
Lerner and Cunningham lived with these songs a long while, writing them before the Pandemic struck in 2020, demoing them at home repeatedly before finally deciding to get together with Horne—an alumnus of previous records, too, as a player—in the producer’s chair for the first time. They tracked the record in LA over the span of about a week, did a bit of overdubbing later in Taos, and thus, after that long period of uncertainty, 5 arrived at its final form fairly quickly. Maybe it’s this paradox, this meeting of speed and deliberation, that gets at the record’s most striking quality, how these songs feel at once heavy and light, ancient and new, like something carved into stone with a feather. It’s a quality that fills me with admiration. Indeed, with something close to awe.